Deep Undercover

by Jack Barsky

  With the help of the KGB, Gerlinde had moved into a larger, four-room apartment in the Friedrichshagen section of Berlin. When she answered the door, I looked past her to see Matthias, who was standing rather shyly in a remote corner of the hallway. As I showed him the teddy bear, he ran away and hid behind his mother, clinging to her skirt.

  When Sergej called him, he reappeared and allowed Sergej to pick him up.

  I stood there with the teddy bear, feeling like the outsider I was.

  Gerlinde half-apologized for the awkward scene. “Matthias is very sensitive, and it takes a while for him to get used to strangers. And you know, you are a stranger to him.”

  Though her words were spoken in love, they stung like needles, reminding me that I was an absentee father.

  This time, we did not travel far for our vacation trip. The KGB put us up in a guesthouse on the Müggelsee, the largest lake in Berlin. With Matthias in the mix, the marital dynamic had changed significantly. I was no longer the center of attention for Gerlinde. The little one had taken the number one spot.

  Like his father, Matthias was a light sleeper, and he caught a cold on the first day. The following nights were anything but restful, in stark contrast to the many nights I had spent with Gerlinde in the past.

  Well, fatherhood has its price, I thought as I tried to adjust to the new situation. Every morning I got up at 6:00 a.m, warmed a bottle of milk for Matthias, and took him for a stroll in his carriage.

  After three and a half weeks with my family, it was time to go back to Moscow. I left with mixed emotions. I was still very much in love with Gerlinde, but our time together had been chaotic. I tried to bond with Matthias, but three weeks was not enough time to establish a meaningful connection with a one-year-old who had no idea who I was.

  During my preparation meetings with Alex in Moscow, I was reminded repeatedly of the need to meet and report on interesting human targets.

  “We need you to produce more valuable contacts,” he said.

  Rather than try to explain the limitations imposed by my circumstances in the US, I promised to do a better job.

  Alex also suggested that I do everything possible to finish college in the next two years.

  “We need you on Wall Street. We need you to make contact with decision makers. And as you look for your first job out of college, try to stay away from the larger companies. They may conduct a more thorough background check.”

  This time, my itinerary had me flying to Vienna, taking a train to Paris, and from there catching a flight to Washington, DC. I spent my day in Paris sightseeing and finally got to see the famous places I had only read about during my years as a student: Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, Montmartre, Les Tuileries, and the Louvre. The only sight that didn’t live up to my imagination was the surprisingly diminutive Mona Lisa.

  The following day, I made my way to Charles de Gaulle Airport, where I got an unpleasant surprise. When I stepped up to the Air France counter and requested a ticket for the flight number I had been given by the Center—not wanting to repeat my transgression from Rome—the young desk agent smiled politely, turned to her left, and announced for all to hear, “Concorde!”

  Though ordinarily the sound of this word pronounced in a Parisian accent would be music to my ears, in this context it had the effect of fingernails scratching on a blackboard. Here I was, traveling with a false passport and almost $10,000 in my pockets, paying $1,700 in cash to fly on a plane that catered mostly to the well-off elite.

  The needle of my risk meter entered the red zone. A cash-paying customer on this type of flight could easily have triggered closer scrutiny from either the French or the American authorities. Luckily, no one seemed to pay any attention to me, but in my first letter to the Center after returning in the US, I complained strongly about this obvious mistake. I never received an explanation, but I felt I had at least regained the high ground after being chided about the Rome incident.

  The Concorde took off from de Gaulle on a dark, rainy evening, and three and a half hours later we landed at Washington Dulles International in bright sunshine, having outpaced the earth’s rotation. The flight itself was nothing special. There was a large display at the front of the cabin showing our speed expressed in Mach (where Mach 1 equals the speed of sound). When the meter went from .99 to 1.00, indicating that we had broken through the sound barrier, nothing happened inside the plane’s cabin. The sonic boom was audible only from below.

  I took a bus back to New York and rode the subway to my apartment. After what amounted to a whirlwind trip across Europe and back, I was glad to be home in Woodside. For the first time, I realized that I felt more comfortable in the country that I was spying on than I did in my native land. My trips to Berlin from this time forward would feel more like visits than going home.

  I KNEW THAT PART OF MY VALUE to the KGB was simply my presence in the United States. In December 1983, I was instructed via shortwave radio to fly to Los Angeles, take a bus to San Bernardino, and try to locate a certain Nikolai Khokhlov, who was believed to be working at the San Bernardino branch of California State University. If I could locate this man, the Center wanted me to send his home and workplace addresses. “But under no circumstances should you make contact with this person,” they warned.

  One advantage of being an illegal was that I could travel freely anywhere in the country, whereas legal agents, working under diplomatic cover, were restricted to a limited radius around their officially recognized office.

  My window for completing this task was pretty tight because I had to be back at school in time for final exams, which were scheduled for the third week of December. I flew into LAX and took a bus to San Bernardino. On the bus ride, I enjoyed a most beautiful smog-enhanced sunset.

  The next morning, I set out on foot from my hotel room to visit the university campus, which was on the outskirts of town. The five-mile walk along streets without sidewalks made me somewhat uncomfortable. It appeared that nobody walked in California, even if the destination was only a block away.

  When I arrived at the campus, I decided to just walk up and down the hallways of the office buildings, looking for some sign of Mr. Khokhlov. Of course, I had a cover story if anybody asked me what I was doing on campus—I was there to explore the possibility of moving to California to continue my studies.

  It didn’t take long for me to find a sign reading, “Professor Khokhlov—Psychology” on one of the doors.

  I was standing about ten feet from the door when it suddenly swung open and a man walked out. Mr. Khokhlov himself? Our eyes met, but I didn’t know for certain that it was him. I quickly made a U-turn and walked away.

  Khokhlov’s home address was listed in the local phone book. I visited the single-family house in the suburbs to confirm it. Having finished my task well ahead of schedule, I spent the next two days sunbathing in a nearby park. It felt odd to work on my tan in the middle of December. Even more bizarre for a German who now lived in the northeastern United States was the Christmas atmosphere at the downtown Carousel Mall. In the center of the mall was a large artificial Christmas tree decorated with fake snow and gaudy ornaments. Nearby, a young woman dressed as an elf took pictures of children who sat on the lap of a man portraying Santa Claus. All the while, a steady chorus of cloying Christmas music played on the public address system.

  About two months after I returned to New York, I saw a televised interview with Mr. Khokhlov, during which he was identified as a Soviet defector. The man I had seen in California was indeed Nikolai Khokhlov. Given that he had been sentenced to death in absentia by the Soviet Union, and that he had survived a poisoning attempt in 1957, his appearance on TV seemed to be a rather bold move. Had he known that the KGB had sent an undercover agent to confirm his whereabouts just a few weeks before, he might have been a bit more circumspect. Much later, I was glad to learn that Mr. Khokhlov lived to the ripe old age of eighty-five.

  One of the classes required for a bachelor’s degree in busi
ness administration was Introduction to Data Processing. When I wrote my first lines of code in FORTRAN, fed them into the card reader, and saw the results printed out faster than you can say “computer program,” I was hooked. This emerging technology appealed tremendously to my affinity for raw binary logic.

  So I changed my major from economics to computer systems. Rather than ask for permission, I simply informed the Center, justifying the switch by asserting that it would be easier to find a job in data processing.

  My time at Baruch flew by, and soon my graduation date was on the horizon. I did my best to fit in and keep a low profile, but no matter how hard I tried, there were times when I just couldn’t escape who I was. Albrecht Dittrich was a highly competitive student, and Jack Barsky inherited that trait. When I finished my first semester at Baruch with an A average, I bragged to a group of fellow students, “I think I just might ace the whole thing.”

  Three years later, my prediction came true. But what hadn’t occurred to me, until it was too late, was that a 4.0 average can also be spelled with thirteen letters: v-a-l-e-d-i-c-t-o-r-i-a-n.

  Near the end of my final semester, I received an invitation to the dean’s office to discuss my role in the graduation ceremony, where it was customary for the valedictorian to give a speech.

  This was anything but good news. I realized that the somewhat unusual case of a “40-year-old” valedictorian at a well-known New York college might catch the attention of an enterprising journalist or at least someone from the college paper. If my unauthorized public appearance came to the attention of my bosses in Moscow, I could reasonably expect some sort of punishment.

  “I don’t want to do this,” I told the dean. “I am older than most students—why not give it to a young kid who deserves it and would get great satisfaction out of this honor?”

  My protestations hit a granite wall. “We have to go by the rules,” the dean explained, “and the rules say that the valedictorian is selected strictly based on grade point average. You are the only one in your class with a 4.0. The salutatorian has a 3.94.”

  I tried another tack: “Listen, I have never spoken before an audience, and the Felt Forum is such a big place. I would be scared to death.”

  The dean now forced my hand with a clever trick: “If you are that afraid, how about if you write the speech and let someone else read it?”

  Agreeing to such a proposal would be a cowardly act. That wasn’t me. Ultimately, I couldn’t turn away from the challenge. So I gave in, and on a sultry day in July 1984, I stepped to the podium at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden, dressed in a cheap dark-blue nylon gown and a constantly shifting nylon cap, and delivered a fully memorized five-minute speech to an audience of approximately four thousand people.

  The irony of a KGB agent delivering the valedictory at an American business school did not escape me. In my speech, I tried to marry my romantic notions of a worker’s brotherhood with the hard-core business lessons taught at the school. I wanted to remind the audience that making money was important, but so was being kind to others. My last phrase still rings in my head: “. . . where a smile is worth just as much as a dollar.”

  That speech was not pure fiction. It reflected a genuine shift in how I viewed the world in those days. I had gradually softened my stance from hardcore communism to a fuzzy vision of capitalism with a human face. Perhaps socialism was the answer after all. I knew I would never discuss any of this transition with my comrades in Moscow, or even with Gerlinde. It took me years to admit it to myself.

  I walked off the stage to the sound of applause—mostly polite and perfunctory, I’m sure—relieved to have it all over with. What was really important that day was that I had achieved the Center’s goal to become a graduate of an American university.

  During my final semester, in the spring of 1984, I had interviewed with several companies that sent recruiters to Baruch. Of the half-dozen companies I spoke with, only one showed any interest in a forty-year-old computer programmer with a perfect grade point average, and that company was MetLife.

  As a messenger, I had made deliveries to the MetLife Building at 1 Madison Avenue. But when I entered the massive, marble-decorated lobby for an in-person interview, I hoped I could one day refer to this place as “the office.”

  After briefing me about company benefits, rules, and procedures, the human resources representative took me to the nineteenth floor for a meeting with two MetLife managers, Mark and Eileen. Right from the start, Mark challenged me with a question: “So why do you want to be a programmer?”

  I was well prepared and pulled out from my briefcase a thick printout of a COBOL program I had written. I placed it on the table and proudly proclaimed, “I’m a programmer already!”

  The two managers complimented me on the clarity and organization of my code, but Eileen added, “Real life is a lot bigger and more complicated than this college stuff. You’ll see for yourself.”

  That sounded like an indirect offer, and indeed it was. Three days later, I received a letter in the mail offering me a position as a junior programmer, with a starting annual salary of $21,500. When I called HR to accept the offer, I asked them to delay the start date until early September. What I neglected to mention was that I first had to make a trip to the other side of the Iron Curtain.

  This time, I traveled back via Stockholm and took an overnight ferry to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Mikhail was already waiting for me, and we traveled to Moscow together by train.

  My five weeks in Moscow and Berlin followed the established routine for such visits, but I wasn’t looking forward to my meeting with Alex. What if he had found out that I had given the commencement address at one of the biggest schools in New York City?

  But those first anxious moments passed quickly when Alex congratulated me on the new job and didn’t even criticize me for choosing a large insurance company. He expressed the hope that I would take advantage of this new platform as a professional to get to know more interesting people.

  It was now clear that the Center had developed an implicit trust in me. They were not observing me from a distance or double-checking the information I provided. This knowledge would play a big role in two major decisions I would later make.

  Reflecting on my years as a spy, I have come to the conclusion that trust is the only viable foundation for a successful undercover operation. If the Center could not trust an agent (as when Stalin ignored the warnings from Richard Sorge—the KGB’s most important asset in Japan prior to World War II—of the impending invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis in 1941), they were better off not having an agent in place. And if an agent couldn’t trust his handlers, he would become ineffective or stop operating altogether.

  In the end, I was the one who would breach that trust.

  My arrival in Berlin was the most exciting part of the entire visit. Sergej had once again bailed me out by finding a present for me to give to Matthias. This time it was a remote control car made in West Germany.

  When I entered the apartment, my now three-year-old son hid behind his mother before sticking out his head and saying, “Ich bin ein Löwe” (“I am a Lion”). But his shyness and my natural reticence did not allow for a real greeting between father and son. I didn’t want it to be this way, but I didn’t know how to bridge the gap between us.

  Gerlinde rose from the sofa, and we embraced. After giving her a gentle kiss, I went straight to the main event, unpacking the dresses and other articles of clothing I had brought for her from some of the most expensive stores in Manhattan. Items of this quality were not even available in West Berlin, let alone East Berlin. After applying some of the cosmetics I brought and putting on the gold necklace and bracelet, Gerlinde looked like a wealthy movie star.

  Matthias was in awe. “Mutti, you are so pretty!” he exclaimed. Turning to me, he said, “Thanks for these things, Onkel.”

  That stung. He had just called me uncle, an endearing term used by German children to address friendly
strangers.

  Behind the scenes, Onkel’s influence had contributed to a major improvement in Gerlinde’s standard of living. Because the KGB gave her my salary, she had been able to stop working and dedicate her time to bringing up Matthias. The previous summer, the KGB had arranged for a vacation in Sochi, on the Black Sea. Gerlinde and Matthias had spent two weeks at a luxury resort, where they were catered to by a cook, a translator, and a dedicated chauffeur.

  Gerlinde’s new apartment was well furnished, including a color TV, a piano, and even a telephone. Telephones were in such short supply that they were granted only to important individuals.

  The most prestigious new status symbol was a high-end car, a Lada sedan. Sergej had pulled some powerful strings to move us to the top of the fifteen-year waiting list. The Lada, produced in the Soviet Union under a licensing agreement with Fiat, was the most upscale vehicle available to East German citizens.

  Now we could drive ourselves, rather than depend on a “company car,” when we made the trip to Gerlinde’s parents in Rehna, a country town two hours northwest of Berlin. I was a bit hesitant to visit them because I was afraid of a barrage of uncomfortable questions. But Gerlinde allayed my fears.

  “Albrecht, don’t worry about my parents. They are not nosy, and to them, you are simply a highly successful fat cat who is taking very good care of their daughter. That is all they want to know.”

  After a week in Rehna and a few more days in Berlin, it was once again time to return to Moscow on my way back to New York. On this visit, I could feel that the emotional connection with Gerlinde had become rather shallow. With our separate lives and such brief opportunities to reconnect, we didn’t seem to feel the same passionate love of six or eight years ago. With a large dose of wishful thinking, I pushed all my thoughts about our relationship out into the future.